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Sunday, October 26, 2008

UK Passenger Lists

A few days ago I mentioned that the UK Passenger Lists had been added to Ancestry.UK, and I provided Ancestry's description of the database:

This database is an index to the Board of Trade’s passenger lists of ships arriving in the United Kingdom from foreign ports outside of Europe and the Mediterranean from 1878-1888 and 1890-1960. Information listed on the passenger lists may include: name of passenger, their birth date or age, port of departure, port of arrival, date of arrival, and vessel name.

And then I went on and talked about how I hoped to obtain access to the international edition of Ancestry so I could see if my Newmark ancestors' arrival in the UK from Poland was in there. I'm not sure how I missed "from foreign ports outside of Europe."

As I've written before, my Newmark ancestors did a lot of traveling in the first decade of the 20th century. Likely in 1904 my second great grandfather, Samuel, and great grandfather Barney traveled from London to Quebec. In July of 1907 they definitely crossed over into the US, and those documents suggest they arrived in Quebec in May of 1904, though I have been unable to find backup for this. I knew that sometime between July of 1907 and October of 1908 they returned to the UK, and in October of 1908 they returned to the US with another of Samuel's sons, Sol. The rest of the family followed in March of 1909.

So while I still don't have a date for when they arrived in the UK from Poland (estimated in 1893), I did make a trip to the St. Louis Genealogical Society offices this weekend and using their computers found Samuel and Barney's return trip from the US to England on June 21, 1908.

I've drawn a box around Samuel and Barney. They traveled only under their first initial, so theoretically it could be a different S Newmark and B Newmark. However, both of the travelers were tailors, which matches, and both of them are single or traveling unaccompanied by their spouse. (That's what the tally mark by their name indicates, here's a closeup of that box on the form):

The only other information it provides is their port (Southampton), they traveled third class, and they were considered British subjects. (later pages contained lists of foreign subjects. This was the first page of the manifest, the date of the ship's arrival was on every other page.)

Barney and Samuel had lived in England for at least ten years prior to traveling to North America, and the rest of their family still lived in England, so it's logical they would be treated as British subjects. They also had to have made a return trip around this time, so I am fairly certain that this is their passage.